daily prompt

The Year of the Cat

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(What follows is a re-run of one of the eight most popular cat-related columns published in 2015 in The Gad About Town.)

The stories about Angel’s supreme being-ness are too many to recount and they bore her anyway. Our entire Planet Earth, all four rooms of it—and, really, that’s three rooms too many for anyone, but space is needed for all seven billion humans upon it—are here because she willed it through complete indifference.

Without trying, but after a really deep stare at nothingness, there was tuna, and even better, salmon treats, but there was no one to bring these savories to her. She developed opposable thumbs but was bored with the effect and thus willed opposable thumbs onto someone who could use them to bring her platters of tuna, and even better, salmon treats.
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How to Be Brave

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Bravery is a skill. I do not know if I have cultivated it in myself.

A young man sits today in a prison, awaiting a death sentence to be carried out, possibly this Friday. Ali Mohammed al-Nimr was arrested in 2012 when he was 16 or 17 years of age (both ages have been reported), making him a juvenile at the time of his arrest. He was arrested at a protest. His country is Saudi Arabia, and the protests in 2012 in other autocratic nations in that region had been effective in fostering change. At trial, he was not given access to the “evidence” amassed against him, in no small part because there was no such evidence. He was convicted, no joke, of stealing every gun and every uniform from a local police station, single-handed.
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A Love of Books

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My girlfriend says it is like watching a kid in a candy store when we visit a book store. I suddenly appear to have multiple arms, like a Hindu deity, and my stride becomes a purposeful lurch.

Any purpose to my stride can be attributed to my knowing that she is not much of a fan of shopping at all, and less of a fan of browsing, of idling, in a store whose shelves are taller than six feet and could crush us.
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